"Makes me wonder if some collision somewhere in space sent a bunch of chunks of large rocks our way"

That idea is just ridiculous, by the way. No disparagement intended because not everyone is an astronomer. But the earth along with everything else is orbiting the sun at great speed. There is no "our way". The only thing that could cause an increased incident of meteors is if somehow there is more debris everywhere, not just here. I see meteors every time I go out to look at the stars. Sometimes I see an unusually large ones.

19 posted on 03/23/2013 12:14:16 AM PDT by Telepathic Intruder
(The only thing the Left has learned from the failures of socialism is not to call it that)

So what you are essentially saying is that asteroids we can’t see and don’t know are there, cannot collide and fragment in a path our orbit takes us?

Wow. Thank God. For a moment there I thought that might be a problem. But since it’s not and we know all trajectories and locations of every solid chunk of matter in the universe, I’ll go back to bed now.

“The only thing that could cause an increased incident of meteors is if somehow there is more debris everywhere, not just here.”

No, that is quite wrong. Increased incidence of meteors colliding with the Earth do occur periodically and occasionally. Periodic meteor showers occur on a periodic and often well known schedule as the result of the rocky debris in the orbital pat of a current or past comet intersects with the Earth on its own orbital path. Occasionally the debris from the collision of asteroids or meteors, usually in the outer Solar Systems such as the asteroid belt, Jovian planets, or the Oort Cloud sends debris on a new orbital path into the inner Solar System. When the orbital path of the Earth and the debris happen to intesect at the same time, we can see an increased number of meteors. Some increased frequency of encounters with meteors and asteroids is random.

Some people are wondering if Frisay’s meteor is related to the lare meteor over Russia recently? The answer is definitely a no. Thier directions of fall were very different and indicate thay came from totally different regions of space. Their appearance in Earth’s skies so close together in time are simply random happenstance. If the two meteors had come from the same direction and region of space, then they could have possibly been related in origin. In this case, however, they are definitely not related in origin in space.

"There is no "our way". The only thing that could cause an increased incident of meteors is if somehow there is more debris everywhere, not just here."

Arguably, there is no, "our way". There is however, "our vicinity." Think of a flak explosion from a single WWII anti-aircraft shell. When it would detonate in proximity to an aircraft, it would send shards of shrapnel in all directions, with just as many shards blasting directly away from the aircraft as directly towards it at the instant of detonation. Since the aircraft was in continuous motion as well, those shards that may have been projected directly at the aircraft at the moment of detonation were no longer moving directly at the aircraft the instant after, but rather at something of an oblique, so in that regard, I suppose you could technically state there was no true, "our way."

Having said that, some areas of the European sky were far more heaviily defended by flak than others, and I'm not sure you would have been able to persuade any pilots to fly into high densities of flak by explaining to them that none of the shards of shrapnel were really going to be headed "their way," or that the overwhelming majority of the shrapnel in each shell would in fact be blasting "away" from them.